Word study
Dying
3 Hebrew and 1 Greek words behind this English word
The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with “dying”. English often uses one word where Hebrew or Greek has several, each with its own shade of meaning. Under each word are verses where it is translated this way; choose the word itself for its full study: every verse, how else it is translated, the forms it takes and what the dictionaries say.
At a glance
How often each original word is translated “dying” or one of its forms.
Compare the Hebrew words side by side
Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)
- מוּת mûthdietranslated this way 5 times of its 771 uses · Strong’s H4191Verb · Translated: die 198, died 152, dead 89, put to death 47Full study and all 694 verses →
Genesis 35:18 And with her last breath— for she was dying— she named vvv him Ben-oni. But his father called him Benjamin.
- אָבַד âbadperishtranslated this way 1 time of its 179 uses · Strong’s H6Verb · Translated: perish 53, destroy 27, perished 15, destroyed 14Full study and all 173 verses →
Job 29:13 The dying man blessed me, and I made the widow’s heart sing for joy.
- מָוֶת mâvethdeathtranslated this way 1 time of its 153 uses · Strong’s H4194Noun · Translated: death 108, die 7, died 7, dies 6Full study and all 148 verses →
Jeremiah 52:11 Then he put out Zedekiah’s eyes, bound him with bronze shackles, and took him to Babylon, where he kept him in custody until his dying day.
Greek words (New Testament)
- ἀποθνήσκω apothnḗskōI am dying, am about to dietranslated this way 4 times of its 107 uses · Strong’s G599Verb · Translated: died 48, die 31, dies 11, dead 8Full study and all 97 verses →
Luke 8:42 because his only daughter, who was about twelve, was dying. As Jesus went with him, the crowds pressed around Him,
John 11:37 But some of them asked, “Could not this man who opened the eyes of the blind also have kept Lazarus from dying?”
How to study a word well
- Start from the verse, not the dictionary. Find which Hebrew or Greek word stands in the verse you are studying. One English word often translates several different original words.
- Read every place the word is used. A word means what its writers used it to mean. The list of verses and the count by book show its range, and who uses it most.
- Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
- Notice the form. A command is not a statement, and a passive verb is something done to the subject. The form in your verse is part of the meaning.
- See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
- Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
- Come back to the verse. Context decides. A word does not carry every one of its meanings into every verse, and where a word came from does not settle what it means in a sentence written centuries later.
What the Bible says about dying: passages by topic →
Scripture text and translation counts: Berean Standard Bible. Full entry: Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906, public domain), in the digital edition Brown-Driver-Briggs Enhanced by unfoldingWord (Joel Ruark, J. de Joode), based on data by Eliran Wong and Stephen Ku; its additions are used under CC BY 4.0. Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary: Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project, CC BY 4.0. Hebrew-to-English verse numbering: original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb, CC BY 4.0. We reformatted the data, linked the references to this site’s Bible text and left out words in other scripts that the source holds only as images. These are historical reference works; an entry gives its authors’ view, and a word’s meaning in any verse depends on how it is used there.